People procure something (products/services) or buy ideas to meet needs or resolve problems. They decide to buy when the pain of the problem and desire for a solution have been built to the point where they are greater than the cost of the solution.
The question now is therefore how to know their needs or problems? To find out these, we must do probing. What is probing? Probing or investigating basically means systematically discovering, exploring, clarifying and understanding their needs as well as their problems.
In practice, we must ask questions. Questions are the most effective form of verbal behavior we can use to persuade. In its simplest terms, probing can then be considered as the business of asking questions.
Multiple research studies have overwhelmingly shown that more questions are asked in successful negotiations, management interactions, performance interviews, sales, group discussions and other interactions than in unsuccessful ones!
Accordingly, we will not get anywhere in sales, negotiations, management interactions, performance interviews, group discussions and other interactions if we can’t find out what our counterparts, interlocutors or prospects needs and how we can turn those needs into our benefits, obtaining commitments or sales.

MATERI TRAINING PROBING TECHNIQUES:

Probing Techniques are the mechanism that gets prospects, counterparts or your interlocutors talking to you about their needs. Probing questions gets the conversation flowing. They are always open questions and closed questions that are used to find out if a need actually exist for your products, services or your expertise for particular prospects.
An open ended question is a question that does not take a yes or a no to answer. It is one that requires the prospect to elaborate on their answers. Closed questions can be answered with a single word, often “yes” or “no”.
So – regardless of if you are working with a prospect that is trying to fill a business opportunity need or if you are answering an RFI (Request for Information) that someone has filled out on your product pages you have to ask probing questions if you want to succeed.
This in-house “Probing Techniques” Training will specify that, within any interaction process: negotiations, sales, management interactions, performance interviews, group discussions or other interactions, there are always four stages. They are Opening, Investigating, Demonstrating Capability and Obtaining Commitment.
The Investigating (Probing) stage is actually the most important phase of the interaction process. It is the investigating stage where probing techniques are used to help us to uncover and develop our counterpart’s problems.
As mentioned above, Probing is the business of asking questions. We then explore types of questions. There are four types of questions: Situation Questions, Problem Questions, Implication Questions and Need-payoff Questions.
The bottom-line expectation from this in-house training is that, through understanding the probing techniques, participants of the training start to ultimately shift their thinking from telling to asking, from persuading to understanding and from a product/service focus to a prospect/counterpart focus in order to be successful in any possible interaction process.